The Story Won't Die

Is Israel's triumphalism over its land grab in Syria realistic? The hard reality is-Israel now has Al-Qaeda as a next-door neighbour

- MK Bhadrakumar

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

-Act IV, Scene I, Macbeth, William Shakespeare

SOME wars end, many do not, but, like passenger trains, they linger in the siding, lost in thought, waiting for the superfast express to pass.

Wars end conclusively when they get wrapped up in a formal peace treaty. The war in Ukraine and the rekindling of the Syrian war fall in the latter category of sub-plots that turned rabid from the lies enveloping them with the passage of time. From such a perspective, the Syrian crisis can be traced to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France through World War I by a secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) defining their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of that empire that lasted almost 600 years.

The force that spearheaded the operation this month to seize Damascus, with Türkiye's support, is called Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which means the "Mission to Liberate the Levant". This must be properly understood while probing Türkiye's motivations in launching such a "jihadi" operation to shake up the modern Syrian state that was founded in 1946 at the end of the French mandate.

The use of the medieval term "Levant" is a repudiation of the word Syria, which was a coinage under the French mandate. That is to say, HTS implicitly denies the existence of a Syrian nation state. The landmass called Syria is, in the HTS conception, a vast ungoverned land, a part of the Caliphate, which is open to reshaping to reflect the current realities on the ground.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan openly alluded to this while addressing a meeting of the ruling AKP party on December 13 when he said: "The cities that we call Aleppo, Idlib, Damascus and Raqqa will become our provinces, like Antep, Hatay and Urfa!" Erdogan believes he's on the right side of history.